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5 Days, 5 Facts: Day 3 – we ARE the Google Generation…

09 Dec

Day 3 of 5 Days, 5 Facts, eh? Starting to question the wisdom of this, taking lots longer than I naively expected, and maybe I’m just writing a load of rubbish anyway, but I will press on regardless…  5 Days, 2 Facts On The First Two Days doesn’t have quite the same ring to it.

Fact 3: We behave just like the Google Generation do

We're all equally reluctant to read the manual

We're all equally reluctant to read the manual

The coming of the Google Generation is a bit like climate change, in that even though we’re all fully aware we have to act now to adapt, we still think of it as something just around the corner rather than immediately in front of us. The UCL / BL report I keep referring to defines the Google Generation as those born after 1993, [1]  which means the first of them are about 16 now and soon to enter the higher education system. If you dip your toe into the waters of generation designation and you find they are deep and murky – defining ‘a generation’ is a fairly abstract activity of course, so there’s plenty of room for grey areas. According to that unimpeachable scholarly resource Wikipedia, [2]Generation X  is the one after the baby boom ended, with a date range from 1961 to 1981. Generation Y  (also known as the Millennial generation, the Net Generation, or the particularly arch Generation Next) can spread from the mid-70s to the late-90s, apparently, meaning thewikiman is of both X and Y generations. And if you type ‘Google Generation’ into Wikipedia, you get taken to the page for Generation Z  – born between the mid-90s and now. So, estimates vary. Presumably the generation after this one won’t thank Generation X for being so short sighted as to start the nomenclature only 3 letters from the end of the alphabet. [3]

The point of all this is to show that there’s a huge overlap in the different classification of groups of people, and that while the Google Generation have many names and may cover many dates, the point of that categorisation is that they are all digital natives, born into the technology, and they’re all about to be using our libraries. What I’m trying to say in this piece is that the digital immigrants, such as myself, actually behave just the same as the digital native much of the time, so we effectively need to cater for Generation Z right now, rather than in a couple of year’s time. It isn’t the generation that is defining the technology – it is the technology which is defining all of us, regardless of generation.

The first major study undertaken in this area (as far as I’m aware) was by the OCLC, entitled College Students’ Perceptions of Libraries and Information Resources [4] around four years ago. They asked the same questions to what we’ll settle on calling the Google Generation as they did to those born earlier, and compared the results. So for example, 36% of the overall cohort of respondents decreed themselves ‘Extremely familiar’ with ‘Search engines’ as sources to find (scholarly) information, compared with 45% of the Google Gen respondents; 26% overall with the ‘Physical Library’ as opposed to 34% of the Google Gens etc. [5] So while the Google Generation are predictably more au fait with the internet as a tool for research, they were more au fait with the actual library too, suggesting that rather than being this separate online breed we sometimes think of them as, they are in fact just using a broader a range of sources for information; they are more proactive in locating them.  Significantly, while only around 30% of the total respondents had used a library website as an electronic information source, more than twice as many (62%) of the Google Generation had done so [6] – suggesting again that this generation’s love of Google  does not automatically entail a phobia of everything else. They are, in that respect, not so different from you or I.

The UCL report looks at the myths and realities of the Google Generation, [7] concluding that many of the claims made on behalf of that generation by the popular media ‘fail to stack up fully against the evidence’. For example, it is true that they are more competent with technology, but the older generation are catching up (and this process is happening so quickly it is probably doubly true now, almost two years after this report was written) and the younger generation use much simpler applications than many imagine. (This is backed up by the Project Information Literacy Progress Report, which found that “…nearly all the students in our sample had developed an information-seeking strategy reliant on a small set of common information resources – close at hand, tried and true.” [8] ) However, there was no evidence to support the notion that young people have less tolerance for delay than the rest of us – we are all equally impatient to have our information needs fulfilled. Similarly the need to be constantly connected to the web is no longer considered ‘a specific Google generation trait.’ [9] And pertinently for us in the Information Profession, the report found that the power-browsing behaviour discussed on Day 2 was common to everyone – professors and lecturers were searching horizontally every bit as much as the students were. I mentioned yesterday an article in the Times which discussed this report – Catherine O’Brien admits: “Power browsing, I have to concede, has become the norm for me. Google has been my godsend as a writer. Research that once required hours of trawling through reports and cuttings, and days of fielding calls to source experts, can be done in a few clicks of a mouse.” It is the norm for me too – all of the research for this string of posts originated on Google, not just because it’s quick and convenient but because the information is a current as possible – various of the reports I’ve cited are published, but at least one has an updated version I could only have discovered online. As I also mentioned yesterday, the Discoverability report[10] established that users now expect discovery and delivery of resources to coincide – this not just a trait of the youth of today, but of all of us now.

So to return to the point – the Google Generation is not just around the corner; it is here now, and it is consuming us too. We are becoming defined by the same traits as it, and now we need to continue to do everything we can to provide for it, right away.

 

[1] UCL (2008) Information behaviour of the researcher of the future, p.7. Available via www.bl.uk/news/pdf/googlegen.pdf  
[2] I’m aware of the irony that I’m doing research about the Google Generation using just the kind flawed resources they do…
[3] And no one will thank anyone for the fact that apparently ‘Generation Next’ refers to both Y and Z generations, making a mockery of the whole ridiculous thing
[4] OCLC (2005) College Students’ Perceptions of Libraries and Information Resources. Available via http://www.oclc.org/reports/perceptionscollege.htm You will be asked to register but having done so you are instantly able to view the report.
[5] 5% of respondents overall pronounced themselves to have ‘Never Heard of’ the physical library, so perhaps all the results of the study can be called into question on the grounds that some of the people were clearly idiots. College Students’ Perceptions of Libraries and Information Resources, 1-5.
[6] As above, 1-6.
[7] UCL (2008) Information behaviour of the researcher of the future, p.18.   
[8] Headm A., Eisenberg, M (2009) How College Students Seek Information in the Digital Age. Available in PDF format via http://projectinfolit.org/pdfs/PIL_Fall2009_Year1Report_12_2009.pdf – originally brought to my attention by a blog post from Free Range Librarian. 
[9] UCL (2008) Information behaviour of the researcher of the future, p.19
[10] University of Minnesota Libraries (2009) Discoverability Phase 1 Final Report. Available via http://purl.umn.edu/48258
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5 Days, 5 Facts: Day 2 – horizontal browsing

08 Dec

Day 2 of 5 Days, 5 Facts and this is one is more explicitly user-behaviour orientated than the first one.

This piece is about the way users approach our digital resources, and what this means for us. Most of the statistical information is taken from the UCL’s report on the Information Seeking Behaviour of the Researcher of the Future, published last year in conjunction with the BL. [1]  Although almost two years old and covered in the past by other blogs, it is a must-read report for everyone in the Information Profession, so do go and have a look at my source material.

Fact 2: Your users are power-browsers

Photo by austinevan, click the pic to view the original on Twitter
vertical browsing

As mentioned on Day 1, it’s easy to track user behaviour now because people’s actions leave an electronic trail. This is particularly useful because I bet if you asked users how much time they spent on an electronic journal, they’d over-estimate compared with UCL’s actual results. Incidentally, the reason the title of the report I’ll quote from mentions ‘Researchers of the future’ is that it was written about the Google Generation (which is in this case defined as those born from 1993 onwards – scarily, they’ll be arriving in Higher Education shortly) but, as we will see in Day 3, the Google Generation isn’t do different from you or I anyway.

What the report found was that users were ‘power-browsing’ electronic resources. I’ve tried to find a definition of power-browsing but all references to it seem to relate back to the original report; it’s evidently a term they coined to describe the horizontal search behaviour they discovered. Horizontal searching can broadly be described as skipping quickly through a broad range of content, rather than vertical searching, which is going into depth in one particular area. (For example, going to a niche website or database on, say, healthcare in the 19th Century, and searching that in detail.) The report describes it like this, with me adding the bold to the bit I think is really significant:

A form of skimming activity, where people view just one or two pages from an academic site and then ‘bounce’ out, perhaps never to return. The figures are instructive: around 60 per cent of e-journal users view no more than three pages and a majority (up to 65%) never return. [2]

It could be that we’ve always behaved like this, even with printed materials – indeed comment 2 on this blog post   suggests exactly that – but my own experience suggests that if you go to the trouble of locating a paper journal and taking it back to your desk, you’ll read more than three pages just to try and reward your own physical effort… The report also says the average user spends just 8 minutes on an e-journal site (4 minutes for an e-book site) so the restlessness of the generation is something we need to accommodate in the library.

In a sense, one could argue that not only are we already accommodating this skipping behaviour, we actually helped foster it. It is precisely because of things like full-text searching that we only need to spend 8 minutes on a site, before we can make a reasonably informed judgement as to whether we have all the relevant information we need. Perhaps the scholarly is process is just more efficient, rather than reduced. And as James Wilson says on the Intute Blog post about this same report – “Having avoided going to all the time and trouble of ordering physical articles up from library stacks, one does not get the same sense of disillusionment in rapidly rejecting material which will prove peripheral at best.”

Where does this leave us in the library? Clearly we need to provide a broad enough scope of resources to facilitate horizontal browsing, but most libraries will do that anyway as part of their collection management. We need to brand the digital materials we do provide, so that our users know they can search horizontally within our own library resources, meaning they can access what we’ve paid so much to provide for them. And we need to develop single sign-in as far as possible to make the horizontal browsing as seamless as possible. The UCL report suggests:

…Information consumers – of all ages – use digital media voraciously, and not necessarily in the ways librarians assume. Any barrier to access: be that additional log-ins, payment or hard copy, are too high for most consumers and information behind those barriers will increasingly be ignored. [3]  

This chimes in with the findings of another report - Discoverability - this time from the University of Minnesota. A trend they identified was: “Users expect discovery and delivery to coincide. Searchers do not distinguish between discovery and delivery in their web searches…” So again, any barriers we are putting in their way will eventual be barriers to their wanting to use library resources at all. (The Discoverability report is excellently analysed in the Bibliographic Wilderness blog.)

 A couple more articles and blog posts online have also covered this subject, at the time the report was produced: The New Atlantis, and an article in the Times which I’ll also be mentioning in Day 3.

 

[1] UCL (2008) Information behaviour of the researcher of the future. Available via www.bl.uk/news/pdf/googlegen.pdf  
[2] As above: page 10
[3] As above, page 30
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5 Days, 5 Facts: Essential Information for Info Pros, relating to User Behaviour

07 Dec

 

Welcome to the first 5 Days, 5 Facts. The idea is to take 5 totally awesome facts and bring them to your attention over the period of a week, all on a certain theme. If this works well, I’ll repeat it with different themes in the future (feel free to suggest stuff). The idea is that if you’re interested in any of these facts, which I will reference with proper academic rigour, you can go away and read the original documents I got them from and learn more. WARNING: for those outside the Information Profession, these facts may not seem awesome. But they are.

User behaviour is an absolutely vital area to keep track of, because in the current information environment it is vital to respond to what people are doing, rather than just provide a bunch of resources and have the users respond to that. Uniquely in the digital age, we know exactly what the behaviour of our users is with regard to their use of digital resources, because what they do leaves an electronic trail. We don’t need to observe, survey, monitor or even question our users; we can just check the log of their activities. (This is not to say that we shouldn’t question our users etc, as context is important. Just that we know how long they spend in a particular database, for example, without having to ask them to make an note of it.) This last aspect will be particularly pertinent to Facts 2 and 3 which follow tomorrow and Wednesday, so look out for them.

Fact 1: The digital universe will double in size every 18 months

This is some of the actual Universe; digital Universe may look less fabulous

This is some of the actual Universe; digital Universe may look less fabulous

The amount of data in the world expands exponentially, we all know that. There is a mammoth amount of digital information in the world as 2009 draws to an end – by mid-2011, there will be twice as much [1] (or even more, according to some estimates which say the data increases five-or-six-fold each year). Various attempts to put this into context seem rather futile to me – apparently if you converted all the current data into text it would stretch to Pluto and back 10 times [2] but really, that’s no easier to get one’s head around. What matters to us is that we are Information Professionals, and our domain (which is to say, information) is expanding at a rate far beyond what we are capable of keeping on top of, and this will influence the behaviour of our users.

I’ve long thought that too much of something can be as problematic as too little. From the profound (academic research when there’s abundant literature on your topic) to the everyday (trying to decide what to listen to from, to all intents and purposes, a limitless selection via Spotify) I’ve actually struggled when faced with too much choice. I’ve recently tried to exert some control over this, by putting all my favourite clips of my favourite drummer onto a DVD, where previously they’d been on youtube – youtube has so much on it, that the chalice I’d’ve given my right arm for as a kid (endless clips of fantastic music, yuss!) becomes poisoned. Uprooting the clips and putting them on a DVD which is very obviously limited has helped enormously – with a level of control and ownership I can relax and enjoy the music, rather than restlessly wondering what other gems are out there which I may be missing. It turns out this isn’t (just) some idiosyncratic spurning of multimedia gift-horses  on my part – as long ago as 1971, Herbert Simon presciently noted: “…a wealth of information creates a poverty of attention…” [3]

This applies on a couple of levels – first of all, our users are easily distracted, their attentions being caught by ‘competing’ enterprises online. As the Internet is the gateway to the digital resources we libraries provide, we are in a small way in competition with everything else the web provides as well. So it isn’t just that Amazon provides more information than our own library catalogues in most cases (look up a common book on both – be honest, from an academic perspective, which gives you a more useful platform from which to judge the volume’s potential relevance to your research? That’s a whole other blog post for another time…) but that consumer or leisure websites are eating into our users’ time online and people are checking Facebook etc instead of the library website.

This is the rationale behind many libraries’ forays into social networking, with plenty of tail-wagging-the-dog library MySpace sites and other horrors of that nature, but, as the UCL investigation into the Information Behaviour of the Researcher of the Future suggests, there is a big difference between ‘being where our users are’ and ‘and being useful to our users where they are’. [4]  As web 2.0 is so much about personalised content areas, there is strong possibility of alienating users by invading their space – particularly if the ‘concept’ for your library’s Facebook page consists entirely of simply having a Facebook page in the name of your library. I suspect that Twitter (to which I am now a convert, worn down by its continued and annoying ability to be relevant and useful) may be better from this point of view, in that one doesn’t have to be ‘friends’ with a library but one might welcome the odd 140 characters or less update as to Christmas opening times etc. It’s a good platform for a library to maintain a 2.0 presence without crowding its users, and without desperately having to think up content to justify the presence in the first place.

The second aspect in which the poverty of attention / wealth of information conundrum applies to us is actually in the form of an opportunity. We’re all aware of the very real danger that libraries could become redundant, with users being able to do their own research, unassisted, and entirely online (hence the phrase you often hear bandied about, that ‘we’re all librarians now’). Who needs a library when you can find everything yourself? The answer to that may be that you need a library as a gateway to information with integrity. The current information-seeking behaviour of our users is simply not fit for purpose for searching on the kind of staggering scale we’ll be dealing with in the near future. You can easily type a key word into a search engine and get a million hits – what we professionals of information can do for you is sort the wheat from the chaff on an epic scale. We can rule out the majority of those hits on the basis of dubious authorship, or validity, or context, or even just quality. And we can provide access to those materials which are legitimate (and the battle of branding ourselves successfully as the providers of that access will be looked at in Fact 4, on Thursday), for our users. These are roles which will become more and more important as the amount of digital information becomes more and more vast. Imagine the available data as an almost random stream of sentences, arranged without rhyme or reason across a hundred pages. You might find a sentence or two which is really useful, but overall the effort required to search through it all would be overwhelming. What the Information Professional can do, is arrange the sentences into paragraphs, the paragraphs into chapters, and provide you with a Contents page, an introduction and an index. More and more, that will become an invaluable service in the Information Economy in which we live.  

This may be how we need to position ourselves in the years to come. Because, returning to the fact at the heart of this piece, we have to remember that the increase in data over time will be absolutely mind-blowing. In 18 months there’ll be twice as much digital information – in three years, once it’s doubled again, there’ll be four times as much as now. On the eve of 2020, there may be over thirty-two times the amount of digital information than there is today!

Step forward the professionals. 

 

[1] IDC’s Multimedia White Paper, “As the Economy Contracts, the Digital Universe Expands,” May 2009, available via: http://www.emc.com/collateral/demos/microsites/idc-digital-universe/iview.htm
[2]as above
 [3] Simon, Herbert (1971) Computers, Communications and Public Interest cited in Barbara McDonald’s “From “Building Library Systems” To “Designing UX”,” November 2009, available via:  http://works.bepress.com/barbara_mcdonald/15/
 [4] UCL (2008) Information behaviour of the researcher of the future, p.16. Available via www.bl.uk/news/pdf/googlegen.pdf  
 
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thewikiman infiltrates the Times Higher

03 Dec
 
I don't even want to *think* about the copyright implications of this picture...

I don't even want to *think* about the copyright implications of this picture...

So THE debate rages on, with all these people having written on the subject of Kevin Sharpe’s slightly huffy piece in the Times Higher (to read the relevant blog posts, which will open in a new window, just click the names below):

[See also links to a couple of Times Higher letters, which I've linked to in the Comments section below.] I felt this was evidence enough that this was an important issue, and worth trying to respond in the THE itself. In particular, I wanted to address the idea that we library people are not making the decisions we do for good reason – like we’re all starry-eyed in the face of ‘fashionable business’ and want to be more like them, or we’re so obsessed with computer terminals we’re blinded to what’s really important, etc etc. I’m sure there are some libraries in the UK who did get overly caught up in the café revolutionising process (and now with Borders closing down we’ll be the last bastion for the pseudo-intellectual latte drinker!) but the majority are making informed decisions which are actually benefiting their demographic overall.

ANYWAY. I wrote a piece of comparable length to the original Sharpe one, based on a distilled version of my own rant, and submitted to the editor. Lesson 1 – the editor does not deal directly with opinion pieces (and I am a n00b). She passed it on to the person who does, and he told me they had a huge backlog of unsolicited opinion articles, so there was no room in the section for me. However, he said I made some good points and he was keen to publish, so would I resubmit it as a letter? I bet he says that to all the wikimen. So I cut it in half again, and resubmitted it – it’s disappointing that libraries don’t get a similar platform as the original academic to fight back from, but I can understand that putting together a section with far more articles than there are space for must be a nightmare, and I was very late coming to the furore anyway (no Twitter, eh Laura..?) so I’m glad they are printing it at all. Lesson 2 – when they give the chance to change the copy, take that chance! I got an email on Monday saying, here’s what it’s going to look like, let us know by 4pm if that’s alright. They’d edited out my first point (about library jargon etc – that our new names for what we do are necessary because what we do and where we do it have changed massively in the last couple of decades) but left in the linking phrase (“And as for…”) at the start of the next paragraph, making me sound slightly unhinged in the letter.

So anyway, the letter is in today’s edition – to read it click here. Viva la fight back!*

In other news, the Frippery page has been updated with stuff about the how people find this site – you wouldn’t believe what people type into Google considering they end up here.  Rupert Giles has a lot to answer for; I’ve mentioned him once and now lots of unfortunate Buffy fans are heading here, presumably hoping to find, I don’t know, facts about killing vampires (or romancing them, or both, probably in reverse order though) but in fact end up reading a mild rant about how Giles prevents library users from seeing us as we really are. Tough times for Buffy fans.

- thewikiman

*To be honest, as much as I’m viva-ing the fightback, I actually got quite scared when I received an email this morning, from Leeds’ Media Relations person. It lists every story in this week’s Times Higher relevant to this University, with links, including one to my letter - and the mail was sent to pretty much all the important people in the Leeds world, including the VC, the deputy VC, ALL the Pro-VCs etc and the Head Librarian. My immediate reaction was not, yay I’m in the THE, but more, oh my god I hope I didn’t say anything they’ll disapprove of… I’m sure it’s all fine, but I now have an irrational fear that I should have checked with my superiors before embarking upon such a public thing with the name of my employers printed at the end of the letter.

I’m just being paranoid, right..?

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